A coalition of civil society and environmental groups Wednesday slammed the government’s plans to expand two coastal landfills in a short-term bid to keep trash off Lebanon’s streets. “The coalition believes that the speed [with which the government] is working to expand these landfills by panic over waste returning to the streets [at the same time as] legislative elections in May 2018,” a statement from civil society group Beirut Madinati said.
The new coalition, which was formed in December and calls itself the Waste Management Coalition, said it would contest any plans to expand the Costa Brava and Burj Hammoud landfills, as per the plan of Environment Minister Tarek Khatib last year. The issue of expanding the landfills is on the agenda of Cabinet when they meet Thursday.
These landfills, serving the Beirut area, were opened last year as a temporary solution to Lebanon’s 2015 waste crisis. However, they are filling faster than expected as they took a large backlog of waste that had accumulated prior to their opening.
In its last session of 2017, held Dec. 19, Cabinet decided to postpone making the decision to expand the landfills, and referred Khatib’s plan to a ministerial committee. No tangible steps forward by the committee have been reported, and it is unclear whether the expansion plan will be addressed in the upcoming session scheduled for Thursday morning.
The Waste Management Coalition has called on the government to work toward alternatives – one of which, an environmental plan to identify sites for the establishment of solid waste management facilities, was submitted to Cabinet in August 2017.
The group also called for the launching of a national campaign to train municipalities in waste management, take steps to reduce waste in the industrial sector and begin sorting trash from the source on a municipal level.
Lebanon has been in and out of waste crises since the Civil War, during which the state collapsed and trash began to be dumped in informal landfills. In 2015, waste overflowed onto the country’s streets after the closure of the over-loaded Naameh landfill. Since then, the government has enacted temporary solutions in the form of coastal landfilling – a practice that activists and environmentalists say contravenes international norms and is causing an environmental disaster.
Despite the lack of a long-term solution, the environment minister has repeatedly claimed that Lebanon does not have a waste crisis. Late last year, he said in a series of interviews that there was no threat of trash returning to the streets.
The Waste Management Coalition brings together organizations including the You Stink movement, Beirut Madinati, Greenpeace, T.E.R.R.E. Liban, The American University of Beirut’s Nature Conservation Center, Recycle Lebanon and others.
Source: http://bit.ly/2lR8ESh
